Email archive: demand of future

Email Archive : Why is it required ?

In Now a day, If your organization / company uses an in-house mail server, an email archiving solution is the only way to take full advantage of the information contained within company emails while simultaneously reducing the amount of storage space required to maintain the messages. Archiving the ingoing and outgoing emails and attachments being sent to and from your employees, also allows you to retain copies in a central location as needed for continuity and compliance, in a manner that provides for future access as needed. It is therefore very important to choose an email archiving solution to improve your company’s knowledge base and address compliance issues by providing swift access to company information, while reducing storage requirements for the files.

The reasons a company may opt to implement an email archiving solution include protection of mission critical data, to meet retention and supervision requirements of applicable regulations, and for e-discovery purposes. It is predicted that the email archiving market will grow from nearly $2.1 billion in 2009 to over $5.1 billion in 2013.

Email Archiving Solutions :

Compliance :

Compliance is rapidly becoming a must-have requirement for many companies. The US is leading this trend, but the rest of the world is following and it will eventually become the norm. 

 

A well-indexed email archiving solution allows your business to not only demonstrate compliance with all email-related business regulations, but also to produce company correspondence if necessary. Current business regulations, such as the FRCP and HIPPA, create specific requirements for companies that correspond with customers via email. In order to prove compliance with these regulations, in the event of a complaint or audit, your organization must be able to produce copies of individual emails sent to customers. In addition, both sent and received email can be subpoenaed during a lawsuit. When a set of documents is requested through the court system, your organization must be able to quickly and accurately produce a large volume of historical communications data by searching and accessing the email archives, instead of combing through the email accounts of individual users.

Storage Requirements :

Without an email archiving system in place, your organization must store emails both on the server and on the computers of individual employees when the messages are downloaded. Although system backups can protect the emails from accidental deletion, this method of email management is both inefficient and redundant.

Your organization can reduce redundancy and speed up your email server with an automatic archival process. Each un-archived email takes up space and slows retrieval and processing on the mail server, as well as the local computer. Automatically archiving email files on a regular schedule ensures that electronic correspondence is removed from the main server to make space for new files. Email archiving improves the response time of the server, while still allowing access to the individual messages when necessary.

Although frequent backups can prevent data loss, and retaining email messages on individual workstations allows your organization to retrieve emails, archival is a better solution. The combination of swift access to files, with a more efficient storage system and the availability of a pool of information for a knowledge base, makes an email archiving solution the only method of storage that provides a comprehensive answer to the challenges posed by an in-house mail server.

Discovery :

Having recognized the business value of email, and implemented policies to retain and archive it as required, organizations will need to search this email for a number of different business purposes such as internal audits, HR requests and compliance supervision.

At the simplest level, most archiving solutions provide a basic search and retrieval capability for data that has been captured and retained within their archive.

However, data captured within the archive may represent only a subset of all available data, so more advanced Information Management solutions provide wider search capabilities that can locate and search all email within an organization, wherever it is located – in an archive, in Exchange, or stored in PST files.

PST Management :

Users may have moved email from their live mailbox out into ‘personal folders’ (otherwise known as PST files) stored locally. They might have used the ‘Auto Archive’ feature in Outlook to reduce the size of their mailbox, or they could be using local folders as a convenient way to store and organize their older email.

Although they are in wide use across many organizations, PST files create a number of problems for IT administrators. From a technical perspective they are not a good way to store valuable data for the longer term as the PST is not a robust file format and is easily corrupted.

These files can be stored almost anywhere – typically on end user devices or network. Although IT administrators know these files exist, they are unlikely to know exactly how many they have within their organization or where they are. As a result they will be taking up a considerable amount of storage and incurring costs, but are probably not being backed up on a managed basis and therefore are liable to be lost or misplaced.

These files can be stored almost anywhere – typically on end user devices or network. Although IT administrators know these files exist, they are unlikely to know exactly how many they have within their organization or where they are. As a result they will be taking up a considerable amount of storage and incurring costs, but are probably not being backed up on a managed basis and therefore are liable to be lost or misplaced.

We have seen that archiving provides a reliable and robust alternative approach to long-term email storage, and many archiving solutions provide the ability to ingest existing data from PST files. This will allow organizations to eliminate the use of PST files completely.

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